The Order of the Day

by Éric Vuillard

Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political contributions. Most of the guests immediately handed over hundreds of thousands of marks. Gustav Krupp gave a million, Georg von Schnitzler four hundred thousand, and so they raked in a hefty sum. That meeting of February 20, which might seem to us a unique moment in corporate history, an unprecedented compromise with the Nazis, was in fact nothing more for the Krupps, Opels, and Siemenses than a perfectly ordinary business transaction,

But the throne itself remains, even after the little mound of skin and bone has curdled in the earth. As such, these twenty-four men are not called Schnitzler, or Witzleben, or Schmitt, or Finck, or Rosterg, or Heubel, as their identity papers would have us believe. They are called BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Opel, IG Farben, Siemens, Allianz, Telefunken.

as a walk-on at Nuremberg. And there, of course, he denied everything. The man who played a major part in Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich, had done nothing; who was awarded the honorary SS rank of Gruppenführer, had seen nothing; who was minister without portfolio in Hitler’s government, had heard nothing; who represented the Governor General of Poland and was implicated in the brutal put-down of the Polish resistance, had ordered nothing; the man who ultimately became Reichskommissar for the Netherlands and according to the Nuremberg indictments had more than four thousand people executed, who as a zealous anti-Semite eliminated Jews from every position of responsibility, who helped craft the policies that entailed the deaths of a hundred thousand Dutch Jews—this man knew nothing.

There’s nothing worse than resentful masses, militias with their armbands and faux-military insignias, young people caught up in false dilemmas, squandering their passions on awful causes.

as if it were possible for each of us to have two lives, as if the game of death could wipe our thoughts clean, as if in the darkness of those seven years he had called out to God, “Who am I?” and God had answered, “Somebody else”—the

a young man in the First World War, Schuschnigg should have read Gramsci instead of love stories—in which case, he might have come across the line: “When debating with an opponent, try to put yourself in his shoes.” But he had never put himself in anyone’s shoes; at most, he had tried on Dollfuss’s suit, after several years spent licking his boots. Put himself in someone else’s shoes? He had no idea what that meant. He’d never gotten into the shoes of the battered workers, or the jailed trade unionists, or the tortured democrats; so the last thing we needed now was for him to get into the shoes of monsters! He hesitated. It was the very last minute of his very last hour. And then, as always, he capitulated.

that nitwit Miklas refused to accept his resignation. Shit! They called up Goering. Goering had had it up to here with those stupid Austrians. Why couldn’t they just leave him the hell alone, already! But Hitler saw things differently. Miklas had better accept that resignation, he screeched, a telephone receiver in each hand. That’s an order! It’s strange how the most dyed-in-the-wool tyrants still vaguely respect due process, as if they want to make it appear that they aren’t abusing procedure, even while riding roughshod over every convention. It’s as if power isn’t enough for them, and that they take special pleasure in forcing their enemies to perform, one last time and for their benefit, the same rituals that they are even then demolishing.

Word was that, in private, he voiced criticisms about such violations of the constitution. Big deal.

Too bad for rights, charters, constitutions, and treaties. Too bad for laws, those normative little abstract vermin, general and impersonal, Hammurabi’s concubines, who supposedly treat everyone the same, the harlots!

This great jumble of misery, in which horrific events are already taking shape, is dominated by a mysterious respect for lies. Political maneuvering tramples facts. And the declarations of our leaders will soon be blown away like tin roofs in a hurricane.